Ben Hur Health and Rehabilitation

While we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively solid government inspections in recent years. We gave it a respectable grade of B+ in this area, which is much better than its overall score. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid facilities with a bunch of deficiencies flagged. This nursing home was hit with 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We also awarded this facility a grade of C for our nursing rating. When calculating our nursing ratings, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most nursing homes. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this facility was awarded just a D in that area. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. We were disappointed to learn that this facility vaccinated just 83.935745 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.

Switching gears to the next category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in our short-term care category. This is the facility's worst category rating. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Considering its weak rating in this area, we weren't stunned to learn that this nursing home offers substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.